"He mails mental pabulum to me, and bestows compliments elsewhere," she remarked scathingly as he moved on.
Amanthus, artless sight, her shingled yellow bang altogether fetching, followed in the wake of Mr. Welling, with cakes in a silver basket. He called back gallantly over his shoulder diagraming her, too.
"Hebe to the children of earth," he explained.
It was nauseating, that is if one agreed with Maud.
Mr. Tate followed after the cups and the cakes with lemon and with cream. It was a risk to let him. He earnestly and even decorously stumbled over a rug and slopped the cream, and as earnestly and decorously looked annoyed and recovered himself. He also made rejoinder to Mr. Welling.
"Juno and Hebe, if you will, Henry," he was the only known soul apparently who addressed this gentleman by his Christian name, "except that in both cases, our Juno and our Hebe are first and last and always, radiantly and commendably, woman!"
"He ... stumbled over a rug and slopped the cream."
Selina who earlier in the afternoon felt she was looking her best in her cashmere with its open throat and the knot of her hair at the nape of her neck, but was less fondly hopeful about it now, took her tea from Mr. Welling, her cake from Amanthus, her cream from Mr. Tate, but something of her state of mind from Maud.
She did not care for tea. If the truth be told, while she was a little sensitive about the childish look of the thing, a goblet of milk still stood at her plate three times a day, Mamma discouraging even a tentative cup of coffee at breakfast. But it was not her lack of ardor for the tea now in her hand which was dampening her spirits, but the realization that she and her companions were but incidents to a foreground adequately filled for these young gentlemen.